COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP)  Thinking big, President Nixon
raised the idea of using a nuclear bomb against North Vietnam in 1972, but Henry
Kissinger quickly dismissed the notion.

"I'd rather use the nuclear bomb," Nixon told Kissinger,
his national security adviser, a few weeks before he ordered a major escalation
of the Vietnam War.

"That, I think, would just be too much," Kissinger replied
softly in his baritone voice, in a conversation uncovered among 500 hours of
Nixon tapes released Thursday.

Nixon responded matter-of-factly. "The nuclear bomb. Does
that bother you?" he asked. Then he closed the subject by telling Kissinger:
"I just want you to think big."

He also said "I don't give a damn" about civilians killed
by U.S. bombing.

That exchange in the Executive Office Building on April
25, 1972, is contained in the largest batch of tapes ever released by the National
Archives. Altogether, roughly 1,700 of the 3,700 hours of Nixon White House
tapes have now come out.

Most of the newly released tapes were recorded between
January and June 1972.

They offer insights into Nixon's historic trip to China
in February of that year  and the mating habits of two pandas he received
as a gift.

"The only way they learn how is to watch other pandas mate,
you see," Nixon said in a phone conversation with a columnist for The Washington
Star.

In June 1972, Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman can
be heard worrying about the erratic behavior  late-night telephone calls
to reporters, for instance  of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of
campaign manager John Mitchell. She had complained about political dirty tricks.

"The woman is sick," Nixon said.

Nixon and his aides are heard talking over ways to limit
the fallout if the White House is implicated in the break-in at the Democratic
National Committee at the Watergate. The plan: Blame John Mitchell, saying he
was so busy trying to control his wife that he was not minding the campaign.

Other Watergate-related tapes include the infamous 18 1/2-minute
gap, an erased segment three days after the break-in. The gap  a series
of whirs, clicks and buzzes  was released in the 1970s. But the poor quality
of the tape makes conversations before and after the gap unintelligible, too.

Facing re-election in 1972, Nixon worries aloud on one
tape that if America lost the Vietnam War and the Soviets pulled out of a coming
arms-control summit, his political career would be history. He says he would
pull out of the presidential race and back former Texas Gov. John Connally for
the GOP nomination.

He told Kissinger, "The point is, we have to realize that
if we lose Vietnam and the summit, there's no way that the election can be saved."

The summit was not canceled and soon Nixon was escalating
the war. The president signed arms agreements with the Soviets in Moscow and
tried to pin the blame for the assassination attempt against George Wallace
on liberals in an effort to boost his own political prospects.

After hearing of the shooting, Nixon asked about Wallace's
health and made sure other presidential candidates were adequately protected.
Then he turned to using the incident for political advantage.

Within hours of the shooting, Nixon is heard on the tapes
stirring up rumors that the suspect, Arthur Bremer, was a left-winger with connections
to the Kennedys.

Nixon can be heard on one tape whispering the rumors in
the background as his adviser Chuck Colson, on the phone with the FBI's Mark
Felt, passes on that Bremer and his associates might be "Kennedy friends."

Nixon's thoughts about the nuclear bomb could have reflected
mere frustration with the war or been part of a strategy to make the North Vietnamese
believe he was a madman and could not be restrained  and so they should
negotiate peace.

"It was politically unacceptable," Vietnam historian Stanley
Karnow said of the prospects of using the bomb. "Just because he said it doesn't
mean it was really an option."

The tapes are replete with Nixon blurting out outlandish
remarks, said Nixon historian Stanley Kutler, who clamped on earphones to listen
to the tapes at the archives complex outside Washington.

"It's a frustrated, angry, confused president lashing out
and calling on what he had access to, to defeat an intractable enemy," Kutler
said, adding that he believed Nixon was not serious about dropping the bomb.

In May, Nixon reminds Kissinger that civilians are an unfortunate
casualty of all wars.

"The only place where you and I disagree ... is with regard
to the bombing," Nixon said. "You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians
and I don't give a damn. I don't care."

"I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want
the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher," Kissinger said. "We can
do it without killing civilians."

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